On 02/19/2013 03:02 PM, Linards Ticmanis wrote:
The "classic" Microsoft Softcard works very well in a IIe, in fact AFAIK there was some modification done during the development of the IIe specifically to make it compatible to the Softcard. You can use the 80col mode with the classic softcard as well; but I think you cannot use the extra RAM, at least not with the standard 56K CP/M 2.20 and 60K CP/M 2.23 versions.
Microsoft CP/M 2.20 and 2.23 are a bit limited in terms of driver support, althought there is a driver for the Sider hard disk and a few other older storage devices.
Applied Engineering CP/AM 5.x will run on the Softcard and that gives you driver support for:
Ramworks Ramfactor (including the ability to boot from it) Sider Unidisk 3.5and maybe a few others I've forgotten (I wrote the 5.x BIOS and most of the utilities and drivers under contract for AE).
The downside is that there's no support for contemporary mass storage devices and the card - at 2Mhz. effective speed - is really not a very responsive platform for CP/M.
Steve